Jan 01 Dennis Jones – Aggression, Samurai and WW2…

DJ  Last month Steve we were talking about reality and aggression training.   Many instructors use aggression training to prepare their students for reality… I’m going to stop here Steve.  But before I get on with the discussion, I must talk history and dispel some of, shall we say ‘misinformation’ that I picked up when I began learning karate.   

Apart from the cultural element of traditional martial arts, historically it seems it has proved most useful for developing, especially among the oriental nations, the ‘fighting spirit’ of young recruits.  During the initial phase of the Second World War the Japanese army were losing many non-commissioned officers and officers.  Brandishing their long swords these ‘Knights of Bushido’ would charge the enemy and then be quickly killed!  Because they were so willing to die within the opening moments of battle, it became a problem for army high command.  However, it didn’t turn into a major issue because the Imperial Japanese Army was finding it easy, in early 1942, to cleanse the ‘white race’ out of the Far East, and every body else who got in their way.  By 1944 things were very different.  The army was by now not only losing officers but were also losing, and in vast numbers, the other ranks that made up their bulk.  To the shouts of ‘Banzai’ often being the last thing they said and heard they died in their hundreds of thousands.  A neighbour, an old friend of my father, had fought at the Battle of Kohima.  Enthralled I can remember him talking about jungle fighting:  ‘Burma (Myanmar) was a hell-hole and we lost a lot of good men there.  But once we got used to their shouting; they were easy to deal with.  We would wait for the shouts and a moment later they’d be charging at our lines.  Swinging samurai swords around their heads we would…’

By July 1944 with the allies closing in on the homeland, General Tojo in effect dictator of Japan issued a statement on the fall of Saipan:

‘…Let us all of our one hundred million people together, renew our pledge and our determination to make the supreme sacrifice and concentrate the traditional fighting spirit of our country handed down through three thousand years to the attainment of the ultimate victor…’

The military upped the pace of indoctrination and getting into the heads of most Japanese, they made sure they knew that the Emperor expected them to fight until the last man, woman and child had been killed.  The population began training with old swords, in fact with all the paraphernalia of samurai weaponry as well as modern weapons.  They trained in unarmed combat and in a similar way as our Home Guard; they got themselves ready to repel the imminent allied land invasion.  However, the allies under General Douglas MacArthur didn’t consider civilians using armed and unarmed techniques of the samurai to be a particular problem for them, even if the Japanese continued to fight once their country had been conquer and occupied.  It went without saying that the nation would have been totally destroyed and General LeMay’s B-29 bombing raids were the start of it.  Emperor Hirohito was wise enough to end the war; overriding the military he saved Japan from total destruction. 

SR I can remember Hirohito’s state visit to London in 1971.  Old soldiers from the Second World War protested about him visiting the UK.  But they got even madder when the found out the Queen had to reinstate all his awards that were stripped from him at the start of the war.  Ex POWs lined the route and turned their backs on him.

DJ Yes I remember that on the news and in the newspapers…The book ‘Hirohito, Behind the Myth by Edward Behr (1989)’ gets to the bottom of the Emperor’s involvement in Japan’s imperial dream.  However, I’ve got nothing more to say about the Emperor except that a number of people, including Lord Mountbatten, wanted him executed as a war criminal. 

The Japanese had by 1941 been on a war footing for decades.  But only a decade or so before 1941, General Araki (…was tried for his part in the “conspiracy” of Japanese leaders to conquer the world.  Araki, in fact, had an enormous responsibility for the build up of bushido as a major element of Japanese philosophy.  But this was not a war crime.  He was convicted of the “overall conspiracy” and of making war against China-scarcely war crimes-but acquitted of all the real war crimes charges. Edwin P. Hoyt.  [1986] ‘Japan’s War- The Great Pacific Conflict.), started changing the history of the nation.

Romanticising and reintroducing the Code of Bushido; the way that most Japanese people thought slowly changed.  And as Education Minister, General Araki didn’t have a hard job getting school children to follow the national policy!  It seemed as if everyone was towing the party line and any disapproving voices were quickly silenced.  Between 1935 and 1939 in a prestigious newspaper (Asahi Shimbun) Eiji Yoshikawa had serialised his novel ‘Musashi’.  The book has now become a part of Japan’s living folklore and influenced many people including Masutatsu Oyama the founder of Kyokushinkai.  And yet only forty years previously the old samurai class were looked down upon.  Often without work, they had to do the most menial tasks to earn a living. 

During the Meiji period (1868-1912) the Emperor put out the following ‘Imperial Rescript to the Army and Navy’: 

 ‘…Farmers and soldiers became two distinct classes.  The warriors imperceptibly changed into a professional caste, popularly called bushi, the principle men of which became the permanent leaders of the army; and the general chaos of the national life placed the chief powers of the Government in their hands, and kept them there for close upon seven hundred years.

No human power could probably have arrested this turn of our national life; and yet it was a thing much to be regretted as being entirely out of harmony with our national constitution and the rules laid down by our ancestors…’

So obviously during the reign of Emperor Meiji he had something to say about the bushi which wasn’t that flattering, in fact ‘it was a thing to be regretted’! 

You know Steve I have an old book that was published in America in 1933 called ‘Daughter of the Samurai.’  The authoress Etsu Sugimote said, ‘…in these later years the petals of samurai memories are falling fast and the twilight is gathering.  It ached me that they should be lost for ever in the darkness of the past.’  On page 46 she reminisces, possibly back to the turn of the century.  ‘Early one morning when I was waiting for a horse-car on a corner near an office building there passed an old man who had the slight droop of the left shoulder that always marks the man who once wore two swords.  He went into the building, in a moment reappearing in the cap and coat of a uniform, and taking his stand at the door, opened and closed it for the people passing in and out.  It was Mr Toda.  A number of supercilious young clerks in smart European dress pushed hastily by without even a nod of thanks.  It was the new foreign way assumed by so-called progressive youths.  It is well for the world to advance, but I could not help thinking how, less than a generation before, the fathers of these same youths would have had to bow with their foreheads to the ground when Mr Toda, sitting erect on his horse, galloped by.’  She continues, ‘…He represented thousands of men of the past, who, having nothing to offer the new world except the wonderful but unwanted culture of the old, accepted with calm dignity the fate of failure-but they were all heroes!’

I know I’m labouring the point Steve but I think it’s important that we separate myth from fact.  Many times I’ve been told that the Japanese unarmed fighting techniques had been forged on the battle fields of the Second World War and that’s why they’re effective.  Then there was that ridiculous statement that the Japanese, because of their martial arts training, would have inflicted enormous casualties on allied soldiers if they could get them to fight hand to hand.  And as I was making my way through the grades all I got was, ‘karate fighting spirit is the unconquerable spirit of the samurai.’  As well as, ‘…the Japanese soldiers who died in battle showed the true martial arts spirit.’  Well it weren’t that long ago that Japan itself didn’t have much time for the samurai class!

To me all this samurai and budo stuff we get is all modern talk.  It’s a sort of image that a fair few western martial artists have of themselves.  It is obvious if you look at history that the samurai and the so called code of bushido were combined with Japanese nationalism.  Certainly Nitobe’s ‘Samurai Ethics and the Soul of Japan’ has more in common with western (at the time 1899) ways of thinking than it had with the Japanese Military of the 1930s.  Bushido was finished, only a few obscure kenjutsu masters and their ilk had an interest in it but General Araki repackaged it and brought it back into fashion. 

Yet, after the war, and reinforced by the media and films in particular, karate came over to the west as a package of romantic philosophy, martial discipline and culture.  But Japanese soldiers fighting and dying in Burma or on a pacific island has nothing do with martial arts.  Like the countless allied troops that also died it has everything to do with a clash of ideologies and I’m glad that we didn’t lose.

SR A little history there Den but I know what you’re leading to but as ‘nearly’ always we’re out of paper…

DJ…I’ll carry on next month!

Steve Rowe

Steve Rowe is a highly successful Martial Arts instructor - an International Neigong, Qigong and Tai Chi Teacher and an 8th Dan Karate with many other senior dan grades in other martial disciplines.

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